In data networks, a flow is a sequence of packets from a source device to a destination, which may be a single device, a multicast group, or a broadcast domain. Data compression at network nodes balances the bandwidth used by traffic traversing the network against the cost in computational resources needed to compress the data at the node. Attempting to compress all data traversing the node is prohibitively costly. The analysis alone on individual packets to determine whether cost of compression is worth potential savings in network traffic utilizes precious computational resources that could otherwise be used for compression and other processes.